Why has Google just ignored every reconsideration request?

Our site www.danbro.co.uk was hit on April 12th 2012 - We dropped for all of our key terms including our brand name.

We believe someone filed a spam report.

After getting to work on what the problem was, we found our SEO firm had built a number of links on blogs but they accounted for thousands of links. Since then we have taken down 95% of these poor quality links with the other 5% simply not responding to our requests. This was all documented in a Google document. Additionally we ended up taken down many more links in our quest to sort out the problem.

Since April we have filed 8 reconsiderations - you may ask why and that we should wait - We have waited and waited and also followed the guidelines documenting everything on a google doc - i dont believe this even gets looked at. Our last reconsideration was August 15th and we have not heard anything.

Google state that every reconsideration gets looked at - i dont believe this to be true. We have not received a single response from Google so we dont know whether we are coming or going.

You can add canonical issues with the www and non-www domain names to that list as well

As IKN says above, there are many issues with your site. Issues that someone taking your money for SEO should have fixed or at least brought to your attention.

In fact If they have not communicated these issues to you, you would face a good chance of recovering all money paid to them. The problems are so basic it can be assumed anyone offering these services would know about them (much like a mechanic understands an engine needs oil to work)

What was the wording of the message from Google to you regarding the reconsideration?

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely,

Since then we really have invested alot of time taking down the crap links. Im going to get someone to look at our on site issues today too.

The search engines view both of these as different pages and they actually rack up page rank and authority seperatly, so in affect, compete againts each other.

This can become a problem on older sites as generally, people link using www, but not always.

Anyway, I say this is basic, because its a 30 second job to fix on a lynx apache host and maybe 1 min on a windows platform. A simple 301 redirection from the non-www to the www does the job.

Bread and butter for anyone claiming any knowledge of SEO.

Anyway, that reconsideration confirms the target as unnatural links, so second stupid question I need to ask. Where are you getting your list of links to remove from?

I ask this because it seems Google will have a group of links they want removed no matter what, they wont budge till these are gone, and they are normally given to you as one of the links in those reported within WMT.

Yes its good to remove the others you know about, but contrate on what Google actually give you as a priority.

We have obtained the list from webmaster tools, SEOmoz and also we looked at what was linking to us in the google search. Combined we had a link sheet of 11,000 links which we went through.

The sitewide blog type links stood out like sore thumbs as they were literally pointing thousands of exact match links to our site. As i mentioned these were the first to go - on average we paid $7 for each one to be removed.

We are again going through the list and requesting webmasters that did not previously respond to remove any links that we feel are poor quality.

We did document everything that we had done in the reconsideration. After research it appears that most people do get a reply but why not us?

I dont know whether it is worth us just starting a fresh new site ifthe team at Google are just choosing to ignor our site?

Since Google's Webspam team likely does not use SEOMoz tools nor other publicly offered link checkers it is best to review your issue from what Google does provide.

You can download a broad view of your total link from each website. Chances are the potential worse unnatural link offenders are domain that provide volume link/anchors.

You can download a record of exact urls Google knows about. Chances are if you are involved in any link schemes you can easily see patterns that Google (or anyone reporting you) can see.

You can also download a record of when Google detected the link. This report might be extremely enlightening give that you got a pre-PENGUIN launch unnatural Manual Review wish suggests your unnatural link webspam is historical (it could predate within 2003-2010). Take a look at the oldest links and see when you "upped your game".

These 3 reports are absolutely MIND BLOWING and 100% free and likely 100% tied to the exact issues Google believes are the issues... things the SEOMoz tools would not be privy to.

thanks - it is so frustrating due to the amount of work that we have done to try and turn this around. The worst thing is, the SEO firm built the majority of the sitewides wich i think landed us in this mess.

Also looking at the webmaster report, obviously some of the sites that we have taken links down from have not been re-crawled yet as they are still showing up.

Dont worry about that, the people who are checking have visability of the current status of them. The links data is never 100% upto date nor all inclusive, though it will contain the ones that Google are looking to be removed.

(Take that page away, I don't think it's very useful to your visitors at best and in the worst case it's something Google don't like)

>>> would you start a fresh site based on not receiving any feedback from Google?

No, not if I was in your situation. I believe "Danbro" is meant to be a brand and you can't give up your brand name as a domain name just because you're temporarily going through a phase of mediocre visibility on Google.

In general, if you submit a new reconsideration request before a previous one has been processed (sometimes - depending on the issues involved and on the size of the queue - it can take up to a few weeks or more to be processed), then those additional reconsideration requests may be looked at by the web-spam team, but they're generally seen as duplicates and not responded to. Because of that, it's usually best to wait for a response before submitting something new (and even better, to wait until you have something very substantial that was improved before submitting the first reconsideration request). In the case of your site, it looks like this happened with the multiple submissions on consecutive days in April as well as in May/June. At the moment, a review of the manual actions with regards to your site is currently in process, so I'd hang tight.